Beijing Achieves a New Geography in the South China Sea

The crowning achievement of China’s dredging in the Spratlys: a lighthouse on Subi Reef that opened last week.
Photo:
Xinhua/Zuma Press

However the five judges on a U.N.-backed tribunal decide the case of Manila’s challenge to Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, China has permanently altered facts on the ground in its favor. As WSJ’s Andrew Browne writes in his “China’s World” column:

The seven Spratly outcrops on which it has built runways, docks, radar and other facilities give China the ability to project new military force in its contest with America for regional mastery.

Possession, after all, is nine-tenths of the law. And China’s island-building may not have ended. The Pentagon fears that Chinese dredgers might be planning a fresh round of construction on Scarborough Shoal that it effectively seized from the Philippines in 2012, which would give the People’s Liberation Army a jumping-off point just 140 miles from Manila. It’s bracing, too, for China to declare an Air Defense Identification Zone over the entire South China Sea, which China could enforce from its artificial islands. China has pledged to ignore the tribunal’s findings.

China’s land reclamation won’t change the legal case in The Hague; semisubmerged reefs don’t become islands even if you build on them. Nevertheless, slow-moving Chinese dredgers have outmaneuvered the world’s most powerful navy. China’s political leaders calculated, correctly, that America wouldn’t risk war over a bunch of uninhabited rocks and reefs to stop them.